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Re: Descriptive or Prescriptive grammar?

Descriptive has the edge in my opinion but prescriptive also has a role to play.

Language use is forever evolving and it should because old forms are often unnecessarily complex or do not serve current needs.

For example, "swimmed" is often used rather than swam in common speech. Why should people have to learn countless irregular verb forms just because they survived the modernization of the English language? Although it makes me cringe, there is nothing inherently better about the form "went" verses the form "goed". It's just an archaic convention.

The prescriptive approach is also valuable in that universal comprehension requires that everyone "speaks the same language". There are already many different regional forms of English. To an extent localized variations of English defeat the core purpose of language, communication.

Re: Descriptive or Prescriptive grammar?

While studying TESL I discovered I learnt grammar in the descriptive manner. I may not know for sure what is wrong in certain sentences but I was able to get top marks for English at every school exam.

Re: Descriptive or Prescriptive grammar?

"Which is better?" is the wrong question. The major problem with prescriptive grammar has been, and it continues to this day, that most, many, whatever the number, of the "rules" of prescriptive grammar are simply false.

Even the prescriptions that work, methods of citation, punctuation, the little conventionss we use for writing are not cast in stone.

There actually isn't any such thing as prescriptive grammar. If there is/was a prescription, it is/was false. Why? Because prescriptive grammar simply delineates correct versus incorrect based on mere opinions. How can any scientific pursuit be based on opinions? It's an impossibility!

Descriptive grammar completely fills the bill. It lets us know where each and every collocation [in a wider sense, not in the narrow sense of one sentence/utterance] used by a native speaker fits into the language.